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Years after I left the USPTO I got a notice from an auditing firm (that later had its own scandal) that the Patent Office has been violating the Fair Labor Standards Act for a very long time and I should estimate from memory how many weekend hours I worked trying to crank out those patent applications, so I could get reimbursed.

This is the government violating its own laws.

And the local, very popular hardware store that I worked in for a while? I caught them trying to defraud me.

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"a condition in which an irrational preoccupation with order, rules, ritual, and detail interferes with everyday functioning and normal behavior. The disorder is characterized by an excessive devotion to work, a pathologic adherence to a definite set of rules or system of behavior, and a persistent, compulsive following of specific rituals. The person cannot make decisions when faced with unexpected situations and cannot take pleasure in the normal activities of daily life. "

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I don't know why, but this made me think of Walmart and how my friend had to go back to working there and during orientation the HR person talked about how evil unions were and then announced that if anyone joined a union they would be fired. My friend couldn't stop himself from laughing out loud and telling her that's illegal.

Contractor retired

I think you have to just understand that sooner or later something will go wrong and you think you are getting screwed. But you also have to now, what comes around goes around. and I can make it go around pretty good myself.
One time I was helping a friend fix up a place 60 miles from my home. @doors were odered from HD and when we went to pick them up, they had lost the order, sorry, you must have odered from another store.
When the girl looked past me and asked the next guy what she could do for him. I refused to move away and demanded to talk to some one in charge. In two hrs I had talked to six people each hifher up the food chain until they came up with someone who could talk to me, at no time did another customer get served, about twenty people inline behind me, saying things like poor service, no one was angry at me.
The guy that did understand that I had some rights also understud that two free doors only went part way to paying for my lost day, so he thru in a gift card for $100.
I had nothing else to do that day and found the whole thing rather intertaining.

Just like in the Army, organizations want to weed out these people before more time and energy is invested in them.
The Army is allowed to provoke new recruits to get these 'malcontents' to make themselves known, and maybe Walmart is, too.

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Wuzzat, I wish that were the case. Walmart actually *does* fire employees for union activity-- when those employees do not know their rights. They try to get people who are dumb as stumps and who won't know that they are being dicked around. On one hand they tell people to report any misconduct and they are given the handbook and told what is and is not allowed (but they hope that nobody ever reads it) and then proceed to try to violate the rules in the handbook.

My brother pissed off the management because he kept a copy of his contract with him as well as the Walmart Employee Handbook that described what was and was not allowed. Multiple times he caught supervisors lying to the lower end employees (and to him) and making threats and telling them they *had* to do something. He would pull out the printed material and show the supervisor where it said that wasn't allowed.

There is one supervisor at the local walmart that tells employees to clock out and then continue working. She tried that with my brother but he refused. She also wants people to do comp time-- if she asked them to work longer and they worked on the clock, she tells them they have to leave early on other days or else they will get written up for doing overtime-- and this store has fired people for putting in overtime.

In order to qualify for fulltime, they have to work fulltime hours for 12 weeks consecutively. So what Walmart does is give the parttime employees fulltime hours for 11 weeks and then give them just under fulltime on the 12th week to reset the timer.

They are notorious for not allowing people to take breaks because they didn't hire enough employees to go around and the people have to wait for a replacement. If they leave before the replacement, they get written up. If they go for more than a certain time without a break (even if it is the supervisor's fault) they get written up. My brother got chewed out because he didn't get to take his break because none of the CSMs would come when he paged them and nobody else was authorized to take the keys for electronics and he wasn't allowed to leave. The managers will typically take more than 15 to 20 minutes to get there when they are called-- if they even come at all. A lot of customers just leave.

There have also been incidents of employees at this store getting injured on the job and Walmart fired the ones who could afford lawyers and ordered other ones to sign paperwork saying that they would not sue or seek any sort of compensation (with the threat of being fired if they didn't sign).

Of course, Walmart tries to find ways to get rid of employees who stand up for themselves (unless its someone that they know they can't get away with firing-- like my friend, since he's friendly with and has contact numbers for people much higher up the food chain). In my brother's case, they found bogus reasons to fire him. And I didn't just get that from him. Pretty much everyone else in the department said that his firing was bogus.

The little bit of karmic retribution was that my brother was the only one there who knew how to fix the printer and the person who should have been fired (because she was actually responsible for the audits for which my brother was fired) would break the photo lab printing machine every time she tried to mess with it. So immediately after my brother was fired, the printer broke. They were unable to print pictures for 3 weeks and they had to pay someone $5,000 to fix it. It was broken again shortly thereafter and broke about 10 more times since then. Each time they had to pay the $5k.

I once had a very rude Walmart supervisor come up to me and tell me to shush when she heard me telling some Walmart employees that under the Family Care Act, the store was not supposed to reject doctor's notes as valid excuses for absence. The supervisor was really giving me stinkeye because I ignored her and she really couldn't do anything about it.